Bait Ball Psychoanalysis
Juliana Spahr
She first entered analysis in a cold Midwestern city in the middle of a deep winter with an intense, perhaps seasonal, depression over the academic job market. She was still in graduate school, although near the end. She had entered graduate school less out of a commitment to the program or the degree or even the subject matter of literature and more because she did not know what else to do with a degree in literature from a small liberal arts college. Six years later, this employment issue once again loomed over her and it looked exactly as dire and confusing as it had looked after she had graduated from the small liberal arts college. The only difference was that there was no possibility of returning to school to delay the inevitable. This felt unmanageable for many reasons, among them the need to pay rent and buy food. She had to find a path forward, one beyond her depression.
So one day she drove to a shopping center, parked in front of a storefront that provided sliding scale talk therapy, and stomped into a crowded, busy waiting room, snow on her boots, slipping a little on the wet floor, feeling absurd with her graduate degree and her youth and her inexperience. At the time she felt that her graduate degree should have made any sort of analysis unnecessary as education should provide her with the smarts to figure her self out. And if not that, it should have at least given her the tools to get a job in higher education itself. That was its purpose: to credential. She thought this even though she also understood that it was an impossible moment to get a job in higher education. Her field had an excess of credentialed candidates and a shortage of full-time jobs. Still, even if a full-time job was too much to ask, in her mind at a minimum the degree should have provided her with a certain inevitable economic possibility. That was how deeply she misunderstood higher education.
Misunderstandings abounded. It was not just higher education that confused her. She also had no understanding of what people did in analysis. She did not know if she was supposed to or allowed to cry or not. She worried she was not supposed to or allowed to, or if she was, that she should do it in some specific way. This worry was because all she really wanted to do was cry all day. She had asked her more therapeutically experienced roommate about whether there was some crying protocol before she went to her first appointment and her roommate had made fun of her a little and did nothing to calm her worry. Then once in the office, she could not stop crying and when the fifty minutes were up, she knew what happened when one cried in talk therapy but she felt shame that she was using sliding-scale resources just to cry about unemployment and not the endless things she imagined the people in the waiting room were dealing with, although really she had no idea who they were or why they too had found themselves seeking therapy and it was presumptive to assume they were uniquely tragic.
This therapy would be short-lived and interrupted with a move. From there on, a different sort of analysis defined her life, each ending with a geographic change. There was a therapist who rented some hours in a classic office setting with a traditional Persian rug in dark reds and browns on the floor, leather chair, near Gramercy Park. Then another that oddly sat behind a desk in an office in the basement of an Upper East Side townhouse, bars on the windows, uncomfortable wooden desk chair for her. She eventually got an academic job in another city and after that she went weekly to a pieshaped room in a circular office building with views of a clear blue ocean out windows that were covered with a film because the sun was too bright otherwise. And then after she left that job for a different one in yet another city, she went to a backyard office with a large squishy chair, an air plant that sometimes died and got replaced by a fresh one, and an odd collection of novels on the shelves.
The understandings she gleaned in these rooms were as various as the rooms and the analysts themselves. She was in these rooms because she was, in part, persuaded by the practice’s bourgeois history, convinced that if rich people used talk therapy to better understand themselves, to better understand why they did things that made no sense and maybe even hurt their interests, then the way out of being hurt by various economic circumstances in her own life was to try their medicine. Often she was there trying to understand what she came to call the Cringe and the Confusion, even if she often did not directly discuss these things, even as she did not often use the words cringe and confusion. The C and C was the reminder that even though she had spent most of her life in educational institutions of some sort or other, she—for reasons legitimate or not—often felt as if she was not of these institutions and this awareness often felt overwhelming. The C and C first manifested as she negotiated the complexities and nuances of the academic job market.
It took her years to realize that the excessive number of qualified and overqualified people, whatever the reason for it, caused hiring committees to search intently, even feverishly, for what they felt was the right candidate for the job. They often were so specific in their desires that they felt that only a few candidates could possibly fit into their departments, and usually these candidates who fit went to the same very exclusive schools that they themselves attended, were of the same class, voted for the same candidates, made the same arguments, held the same values. For years, as she looked for work, she had not noticed the power of exclusive institutions to determine hiring. Instead, she had confusedly thought that what defined the hiring was, if not exactly mediocrity, then something similar to it, perhaps not mediocrity but a sort of conformity. And she had then wondered how it could be so obvious to so many hiring committees that she did not fit when really she felt as if she was as mediocre as the vast majority of people who got hired. She had read the same books and written the same amount of seminar papers and gone to similar amounts of conferences and thought the same mundane thoughts.
“The understandings she gleaned in these rooms were as various as the rooms and the analysts themselves.”
By the time she was going weekly to the pie-shaped room she was lucky enough to have a job, a decent enough job. But it was as if she could not escape the power of the C and C. The C and C were unrelated to her current economic situation, unrelated to her employment. And these feelings were brought on by the most mundane of moments, such as when it was said in a meeting that students like herself, students who were raised in a certain economic situation, might not be able to comprehend a syllabus and so maybe a special orientation session should be held for them that explained that a syllabus was a list of assignments arranged by date. She could not remember the moment where she herself first encountered a syllabus, and so it was not clear to her that this first encounter had been at all confusing, but still she felt shame at the possibility that maybe she had at one time not understood such an obvious and self-explanatory thing as a syllabus. And then even more shame that she might as a freshman have been forced to attend some special orientation session for people where obvious things were explained to them because the circumstances of their birth meant that they were not of this place, even if the intention of the orientation session was to be inclusive.
In the various rooms of both university and therapy, she often thought of her father who had told her this elaborate story about how he had fought his way to graduate from high school—a story that at the time felt to her as if it was out of Dickens as it involved a professor from Yale being willing to soft-adopt him after he aged out of the orphanage that had housed him during his childhood. Then years later, going through some paperwork after his death, she realized that the story was a lie. He had never graduated from high school. That her father had lied was not all that interesting to her, it was to be expected, but the particulars of the lie—the kindly Yale professor who somehow recognized his potential and was willing to house him for two years—did interest her.
During these years, she took to picturing herself as a sardine in a bait ball, that moment when thousands of small sardines swarm together, dashing one way and then the next, twisting and turning as they circle around an empty center to avoid predators. “I am worried she will not be right for our students,” someone told her later was said about her at a discussion for yet another job she did not get. And her first thought was fair enough; her bait ball had never been and still was not the one where the average family income of the student body was above what she made as a full professor, as it was at that particular university. But she knew that fair enough was not the right answer. The word “fit” was more complicated than just family income or fathers without a high school education but the reason that she thought it—the reason that she, no matter what, wandered around her bait ball circling back and forth in a tight circle—was the reason she was trying to understand in therapy.
*
I have written this so far in the third person because it felt as if there was no other way to write this, probably because I still feel shame about many of these things, so much so that I am reluctant to articulate these things within any of the various sorts of rooms in which I work or talk. One of the clichés of analysis is that an individual might best be understood through their neuroses and the resulting internal conflicts and unresolved traumas provoked by these neuroses. This cliché repeatedly trips me up. I have often thought that I am supposed to be able to figure my way out of the bait ball without admitting I am in a bait ball. But at some point I realized that the only way I could get to the understanding that I sought from talk therapy was through the dedicated study of bait balls. I began making a spreadsheet that listed where the major figures in my field studied, what awards they had won, where they taught, who had mentored them, stuff like that. I did not work on it alone. I worked on it with two others. And as we worked on this spreadsheet we typed the words Harvard, Columbia, and Yale over and over.
When we first started working on this spreadsheet I had no idea why we would do this. It just felt like a compulsion, like something that had to be done. We often joked about how the spreadsheet was making us crazy. But really, the opposite was true. The spreadsheet did some work as it sorted the amorphous twisting and turning of the bait ball into something that made a comforting sense to me. Eventually, and I suspect my analyst at the time had something to do with this, I came to think of the spreadsheet as a version of my father’s imagined kindly Yale professor, a sort of circumstantial coping. I would prefer to be like my father, to conquer my unresolved traumas through the shorthand of a lie. But it is a different time. My father’s lie was generationally possible, enabled by the irregularities and localism of paper record-keeping, a possibility that has now disappeared. Of course, the work of understanding my internal conflicts and unresolved traumas continues; I still feel firmly in that bait ball, still feel the call to circle around aimlessly. But, from analysis, I at least got the recognition that—when I reached the edge of the ball and, without thinking, turned back toward the middle—there was a reason that I did this.
There are other confessions, other numbers, that I should at least gesture towards. The analyst with whom I discussed these issues for many years met with me weekly in an office at the back of his yard—in the most expensive zip code, in one of the most expensive cities, on the most expensive coast—inside one of the most prosperous nations. His house was tasteful but not exceptional, but still it was valued at close to three million. Yet as I walked to his office to discuss the C and C, I left from my house, another unexceptional house. And while it was located in a less expensive zip code—within one of the most expensive cities, on the most expensive coast, inside one of the most prosperous nations—it is currently valued at over one million dollars. It is not, in other words, that either of us are under-leveraged. A two-million-dollar difference is not peanuts, but also it is all wealth all the way down. But somehow the wealth that I have on paper continues to be unable to counter the bait ball and the C and C.